“The body is the closest that we come to touching any kind of reality. And yet we have the desire to flee the body: many religions are based entirely on disembodiment, because the body brings with it mortality, fear of death. If you accept the body as reality, then you have to accept mortality and people are very afraid to do that.”
“Body and Soul: An Uneasy Alliance” is chapter 8 from “The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life,” by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski (co-creators of terror management theory).
If you join me on Saturdays (on my YouTube channel), you’ll know that we’re going through this wonderful book and learning a tremendous amount about how knowledge of our impending deaths drives so much of our behavior, good and bad. I’m posting this as a follow-up to the reading and for those who have watched or listened to the video.
Sub-Chapters and Notes
DISTANCING FROM AND DISPARAGING ANIMALS
We regulate activities that remind us of our corporeal nature.
We alter and adorn our bodies.
We scrub ourselves to eradicate any scents except those that come from bottles or spray cans.
We use “rest” rooms to discretely dispose of bodily excretions.
We recoil in sophomoric mirth (amusement) at the sight of animals copulating.
Disgust: We are “disgusted” by far more than rotting flesh.
Bodily secretions like blood, vomit, urine, and feces are more disgusting after thinking about death.
We are determined to deny our animality. We want to separate ourselves from animals; we want to be special and superior to the “lowly” animals. Animals remind us that we will die. We hide all of our animal behavior; we have toilets, plates, forks, spoons, and cups; we shave, we wear clothes, and we disguise sex as “love.”
THE MORTIFICATION OF THE FLESH
We believe we are superior to all other life forms (Bible, created in the image of God, etc.).
Scourging purifications. Whipping the flesh, conquering the flesh—Saint Paul, “Live by the flesh, you will die, put the deeds of the body to death, and you will live.”
FOR BEAUTY, WE MUST SUFFER
We decorate our flesh with ink, piercings, scarring, etc.
We distinguish between the world of culture and the world of nature (man vs. animal).
We have a need to reduce our resemblance to animals; animals remind us of death.
Eating from the Tree of Knowledge made the naked human body shameful; it revealed the “worm at the core." - death
We go to great lengths not to look old—cosmetics, surgery, etc.
Hair: Hairy bodies have always been associated with uncivilized, amoral, sexually promiscuous, and perverted animality.
Transforming from animal to human through modifications—piercings, tattoos, and scarification—reinforces that we are more than mere animals.
Neck rings, feet, waist, and head binding permanently disable people for “beauty” and “status.”
Millions of Americans get plastic surgery every year; the need for a “youthful appearance” is paramount!
“SEX AND DEATH ARE TWINS”
Sex is both exhilarating and frightening to us.
Ernest Becker said, “Sex is of the body, and the body is of death.”
Sex is a potent symbol of our creaturely, corporeal, and ephemeral conditions.
Sex is first and foremost a glaring reminder that we are animals; next to urination and defecation, it is the closest human beings come to acting like beasts.
We recognize that animals and humans have sex in the same way.
Reproduction makes us painfully aware that we are transient ambulatory gene repositories (pass it on and die).Ernest Becker was right then when he proclaimed that “sex and death are twins." Thinking about death makes the physical aspects of sex unappealing, and considering the physical aspects of sex nudges death thoughts closer to consciousness.
We manage our death-fueled anxiety about sex by imbuing it with symbolic meaning, transforming it from the creaturely to the sublime, thereby making it psychologically safer.
We transform sex into a cultural ritual, making it less animalistic.
Animal lust becomes human love.
LA FEMME FATALE
Women’s bodies and sexual behavior are especially subject to rules and regulations.
Men have always made the rules, and women arouse sexual lust in them.
Disgust with menstruation and lactation: a lab study
From time immemorial, men have utilized their superior physical strength, political power, and economic clout to dominate, denigrate, and control women, as well as using women to serve as designated inferiors in order to prop up their self-esteem.
Women make men hard, and this makes it hard for men to ignore their own animality.
The reason so many men are misogynistic is because they are reminded of sex when encountering women, they are threatened by this.
Men are reminded of their animality through the sexual arousal of women and are reminded of their impending death.
Many major religions belittle women, making them subject to men.
Widespread patterns of violence against women may well be partially rooted in men’s sexual ambivalence; the conflict between lust and the need to deny animality makes men uncomfortable with their own sexual arousal.
Being an embodied animal aware of death is indeed difficult. We simply cannot bear the thought that we are biological creatures, no different from dogs, cats, fish, or worms. Accordingly, people are generally partial to views of humans as different from and superior to animals. We adorn and modify our bodies, transforming our animal carcasses into cultural symbols. Rather than thinking of ourselves as hormonally regulated gene reproduction machines bumping and grinding our way toward oblivion, we “make love” to transform copulation into romance. And when women ooze hormones, blood, and babies, men blame them for their own lustful urges, which serves to perpetuate negative stereotypes about and justify abuse of women.
The terror of death is thus at the heart of human estrangement from our animal nature. It isolates us from our own bodies, from each other, and from the other creatures with whom we share noses, lips, eyes, teeth, and limbs everywhere on the planet.
“Humans cannot live without illusions. For the men and women of today, an irrational faith in progress may be the only antidote to nihilism. Without the hope that the future will be better than the past, they could not go on...
Humanists like to think they have a rational view of the world; but their core belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world’s religions. Outside of science, progress is simply a myth.”